[xmonad] darcs patch: Add ShowWName a layout modifier to show the workspace...

[David Roundy]

On Sun, Dec 30, 2007 at 02:29:27PM +0100, Andrea Rossato wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 01:52:48PM -0500, David Roundy wrote:
> > We'd definitely want to figure out a way to get a timer event into
> > xmonad.
> 
> yes, something like this would be great. I don't know is the X server
> can do that. I need to investigate (but I have the feeling the answer
> is no).

I can't help but think that there must be an elegant solution.  :(

> > Another approach, of course, would be to simply call an external program
> > that displays the workspace name and then vanishes.  It's a little hokey,
> > but I suspect kdialog could do it pretty nicely.
> 
> without installing any 3rd party stuff, I think we could just create
> some binaries, along with the library created by xmonad-contrib.

I'm not sure which is better.  Relying on 3rd party stuff for an optional
extension is a pretty nice solution.  It's actually quite nice to reuse
reuseable components.  But you're right that it's definitely less simple
for our users...

> We could have this very little program to display the workspace name
> (or any other string), with a timer. Then we could add some other
> utilities, such as a screen locker, a pointer hider, and so. The stuff
> I was hacking as xmonad-utils, and that I'm actually using.
> 
> Or just have this 3 package: xmonad-utils, a small set of x utilities
> like the one I was talking about.
> 
> what do you think?

Not a bad idea, but I'd really rather not require a whole host of
executables.  I don't see any fundamental reason why xmonad can't be a
single executable... other than perhaps that we've got a bad X11 library
that disallows reasonable use.  But since dons is now maintaining the X11
package, we could perhaps fix that.  Or perhaps there's a non-blocking
way to get events?
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University